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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a